In Brooklyn, 2 Worlds on an Edge; At the Scene of a Bias Beating, a Line Divides Red Hook and Carroll Gardens

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: September 28, 1997

Carroll Park, a placid haven of benches and ball courts in the heart of Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, reflects the neighborhood's blend of Italian-American families and yuppie strivers. Old men play boccie there while newer arrivals hold wine-tastings to raise money to keep the park spruced up.

But a group of black youths interviewed recently in Red Hook, a world away on the other side of Hamilton Avenue, told a harsher story, the flip side of the neighborhood's Old World cohesion and friendliness. Five of the six youths said they had been chased from the park at least once by white youths.

Larry Jackson, 17, displayed a scar he said he received when more than a dozen white youths accosted him and hit him with a hockey stick. Brandon Mack, 14, said he and two friends were showered with insults when they ventured onto a basketball court in the park this summer.

''They said, 'Get out of the sun; you might melt because you're chocolate,' '' he said.

Carroll Gardens has a vibrant, multicultural street life that evokes the Greenwich Village of several decades ago, but such tolerance seemed lost on white youths interviewed in the park, who confirmed that black people from Red Hook were not welcome. ''It's boundaries,'' said Michael Lucigano, 16, who was playing basketball. ''You pass the line, you get chased out.''

That line looms large in the lives of these two neighborhoods, split apart by Hamilton Avenue and the buzzing Gowanus Expressway. The divisions were chillingly underscored last week, when the police said four white men from Carroll Gardens chased down a black man they apparently did not know and struck him with a car, kicked him, and beat him with a baseball bat and a steering wheel lock. The victim, Kevin Teague, 26, a United Parcel Service worker, was released from the hospital after receiving 13 stitches on his head and face. So far, the incident has not provoked strong protests in the manner of Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, partly because Mr. Teague has asked that there not be demonstrations.

''We are a community building bridges,'' said Judith Dailey, a lifelong resident of the Red Hook Houses who is active in tenant and community affairs. ''We're not letting these sick kids tear down our work.'' Rather, she sees the tragedy as just another in a regular series of incidents with which the two neighborhoods, Carroll Gardens and Red Hook, must grapple. ''This happens every once in a while,'' she said. ''It is an ongoing situation.''

The neighborhoods were once one, South Brooklyn, but even before the opening of the Gowanus Expressway in 1941, Red Hook was the poorer cousin. People who lived there, on what is the south side of Hamilton Avenue, were called ''Hookies,'' while those on the north were called ''Creekies'' in honor of the polluted Gowanus Canal. The predominantly Italian Hookies fought regularly with the Irish Creekies. Violence was common.

''If you gave any of us an excuse to ventilate, we would ventilate,'' said Salvatore Scotto, a funeral director who has dedicated his life to neighborhood civic affairs and claims credit for dreaming up the term Carroll Gardens in 1964. The racial labels are different today, he said, but ''the phenomenon hasn't changed.''

Mr. Scotto said ethnic divisions have long been so severe that the Roman Catholic Church used to gerrymander South Brooklyn parishes to separate the Irish and Italians, and then did the same thing later to keep separate the newly arrived Hispanic Catholics.

Today, Hamilton Avenue remains the dividing line between Carroll Gardens and Red Hook. It was the street that Mr. Teague was scrambling to cross to escape to Red Hook. The police have charged four in the attack: Ralph Mazzatto, 25; Anthony Mascuzzio, 18; Andrew Russo, 19, and Alfonse Russo, 17.

''It's like two different planets,'' said Linda Bell, who lived in Red Hook for much of her life and works as a bookkeeper in a child-care center in Carroll Gardens.

Red Hook is the long-rotting heart of the moribund Brooklyn docks, a pastiche of Edward Hopper streetscapes and home of one of the nation's largest low-income housing projects, the sprawling Red Hook Houses.

The subway is 10 long blocks away across the Gowanus Expressway, and it was shortly after he left this distant subway station that Mr. Teague was first accosted. Carroll Gardens is still about two-thirds Italian, and draws its name from the large gardens that the brownstones have in both front and back. Its main thoroughfare, Court Street, once was the route of the big Mafia funerals. In recent years the neighborhood has become so appealing to yuppies that the older residents, many now pushed to the neighborhood's southern fringes, are beginning to feel priced out.

A journey through both neighborhoods shows that they are not entirely separate. People from Red Hook shop, go to movies and get their hair cut in Carroll Gardens. White youths play sports on the spacious playing fields near the Red Hook Houses. People from both communities play together on basketball and softball teams. Black and white patrons drink espresso at Court Street cafes. But as people struggle to come to grips with the latest incident, it is the not-always-visible tensions, the barely voiced disappointments, the unanswered questions that come up most.